Islamic militants attack army in Lebanon’s south

Islamic militants attacked an army checkpoint Sunday in the south near the country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, raising fears that a second front has opened between the Lebanese army and Al Qaeda-inspired fighters.

Thousands of soldiers are already deployed in the northern part of the country, fiercely battling a few hundred fighters who are holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp there.

Fighters from the Jund al Sham group attacked the checkpoint at the entrance to the Ein el Hilwa camp with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. A soldier and a civilian were injured as the army fought back in an almost three-hour gunfight.

Although no one was killed at the camp near Sidon, military officials were alarmed by the specter of fighting spreading.

“It’s an echo of what’s going on in Nahr el Bared,” the refugee camp in the north where fighting is taking place, said an army official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to give his name when making statements to the media. “I’m afraid this incident could develop into a second front. All the elements of trouble are there.”

During the weekend, at least 10 soldiers were killed at the Nahr el Bared camp after new fighting flared Friday. Since clashes at the camp began May 20, at least 41 soldiers have been killed and 160 have been injured. At least 27 militants are confirmed dead but many more may have been killed, military officials said.

Aid organizations have had limited access to the camp, so there are no reliable figures for civilian casualties in what has become the deadliest internal fighting in Lebanon since the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.

“Since the clashes in Nahr el Bared, we have felt we’re going to get it,” said Ivine Ahmed, a 22-year-old resident of Ein el Hilwa. “Everyone is prepared for the worst.”

Ahmed Jumar, 39, had taken his family to safety outside the camp. He was now negotiating with a soldier to be let back in so he could pack his family’s belongings. “What can we do -- where can we go?” he asked.

Jund al Sham, one of several militant Palestinian factions in the Ein el Hilwa camp, is a relatively small group that has clashed with the military before. It presently has fewer than 100 fighters in the camp, which is home to about 100,000 residents, Palestinian and Lebanese officials said.

Some members of the group have fought against American-led forces in Iraq, and a contingent of fighters joined Fatah al Islam in the north in its battle against the Lebanese army at the smaller Nahr el Bared camp.

“If we fail, this will be a catastrophe,” the army official said. “It will be another Iraq.”

Lebanon is home to about 400,000 Palestinians, who live in a dozen camps across the country. The army is bound by a 1969 agreement not to enter the refugee camps, and military officials say that soldiers have kept that pledge. But salvos of machine-gun fire dominated the fighting at Nahr el Bared on Sunday, suggesting close combat.

During the early afternoon, children and teenagers from a nearby village climbed a hill to get a better view of the fighting. Chewing green almonds, they listened to the rattle of gunfire and watched as smoke billowed above the devastated camp on the shore of the Mediterranean. At the top of a road leading into the camp, two women shared a cigarette as they followed the battle from their balcony.

During a lull in the fighting, a convoy of aid workers was able to get inside the camp, evacuating one person. But debris and rubble from houses destroyed by army shelling prevented them from reaching other trapped civilians.

Red Cross officials say as many as 7,000 civilians from an original population of about 40,000 are still in the camp, suffering from the food, water and medicine shortages.

“The basic infrastructure has been destroyed,” said Victoria de la Guardia, a Red Cross representative who went into the camp Sunday to deliver water, bread and candles.

Despite a two-week chokehold by the army that has cut off electricity, food and water supplies to Nahr el Bared, the militants fought furiously for many hours Sunday.

Militants from Fatah al Islam are ideologically linked to Al Qaeda. Investigators say its leader, Shaker Abbsi, collaborated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the late leader of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq, in the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan in 2002.

roug@latimes.com

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Special correspondent Rafei reported from Ein el Hilwa and Times staff writer Roug from Nahr el Bared.